


In the eye of the beholder

by milkywaybandit (Akumzae)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: A threesome would fix this, Also known as that one time Padmé tried to train her dragon, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Angst, F/M, Feelings of Inadequacy, Human Disaster Anakin Skywalker, Jealousy, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Mess, One-sided martial problems, POV Outsider, POV Padmé Amidala, Padme is a Queen, Padmé is having a tough time being the only one with emotional intelligence, Pre-Slash, but ended up with a lot more than she bargained for, complex characters, that’s all I’m saying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:42:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24570259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akumzae/pseuds/milkywaybandit
Summary: At first, she watches Obi-wan and Anakin because she wants to learn. To learn how Obi-wan manages to her husband’s wild anger with nothing more than the accented curl of his name. But to learn one secret is to discover many others, forcing Padmé to address her own insecurities about her marriage and the crush her husband doesn’t realise he has on his ex-master.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 32
Kudos: 294





	In the eye of the beholder

**Author's Note:**

> Yeahhhh so I don't even know how this happened. A little nervous about posting this so if y'all could comment that would be fantastic.

Sometimes, in the dark corners of her mind she knows not even a force user could find, Padmé is glad that the war takes Anakin away from her as often as it does. It’s not that she doesn’t miss him, that she doesn’t ache when he’s not there, it’s more that Anakin is… a lot for one person to handle on their own. 

It’s hard not to feel ashamed of the thought, when she thinks of Obi-wan who spends far more time with Anakin in situations that seem to be designed to bring out the worst in him. Obi-wan, who was responsible for Anakin during the inevitable nightmare that would have been his teenage years. She isn’t Obi-wan though and that’s okay, a battlefield is not the place to try maintain a secret marriage. 

Yet the war continues and these days it feels like she only sees Anakin when one of them is dead, dying or will be by the end of their reunion. The latest is when she is once again captured and kept hostage so she can be used to bait her idiot husband into a trap, who of course grabs his padawan and his best bud Kenobi before confidently springing said trap. She does wonder where the Jedi got their tactic training. 

Though it is not a new situation, her capturers are a little crueller and a lot more jittery than usual, so they decide that sending videos of her torture to the senate is the best way ensure their demands are met. Videos she has no doubt the chancellor sent immediately on to the Jedi, and therefore Anakin, as well. 

She grits her teeth and bares it as best she can before she feels the building tremble, knowing her rescue is imminent. Sure enough, it is only minutes later when she hears to familiar sound of a lightsaber as it breaks open the lock of her cell. She sighs in relief, though she tries not to be disappointed when she sees that it is Obi-wan who runs through the door with a few clone troopers on his tail. 

“You alright Senator?”

“I’ve been better. Just get me out of here please?” she whispers, trying to keep her voice from shaking as he gently unchains her and leads her to the entrance and back outside, where a command tent has been set up. 

As brave a face as she tries to put on, she can feel herself crumble as soon as she sees her husband’s face, weaving between the troopers as he hurries towards her. It’s hard not the break down right there, to beg that he just _hold her_ and hide her from the world and the war.

“Padmé! Thank god you’re…”

She can tell the moment he truly takes in her injuries; the swollen and bruised cheek, the small deliberate cuts that litter her arms and the careful way she hugs her ribs. She sees the way his eyes seem to suddenly shine as he bares his teeth, that horrible darkness overwhelming his vision. 

“Where is that _sleemo_ ,” he hisses, “tell me they got the bastard who did this?” 

Anakin is… furious. Barely her a relived hug and a once over, before realising the man responsible for her black eye and aching limbs is not among the prisoners. The rage only grows as his mind spirals into that same horrible darkness she had seen after his mother had died. She feels like crying, why now, she doesn’t know if she can be strong for him right now. Not when she can barely be strong enough to stop herself. She can’t be there for him right now, not when she needs him to be there for _her_. 

It’s the moments like these that she fears the man she calls her husband, when she remembers that this man can and will slaughter innocents in his anger and call it justified.  
She knows he would never hurt her, but she is so very terrified of the lengths she knows he would go to keep her safe, utterly terrified of the things she could make him do. She looks desperately around, all too aware that Obi-wan is only a few feet away and is bound to notice something is wrong if Anakin doesn’t calm down. 

“Knight Skywalker… Anakin _please_. You need to calm down, I don’t like seeing you like this,” she tries to whisper reassurances to him only for him to shrug the hand she places on his shaking arm, not having time for the wife in front of him when he sees only the continual sound of the tortured wife’s screams playing out behind his eyelids. It hurts, more than any of her physical injuries. She doesn’t know what to do, how to stop the disaster before her unfolding. 

Until Obi-wan lifts his head from where he is reading through a data pad a clone had handed him, having somehow caught the rebuff despite the little attention he was seemingly paying the pair. 

“Ana- _kin_ ,” he admonishes with that curling coruscant accent Anakin spends so much time mocking, before going back to reading what is no doubt the next crisis requiring The Team’s’ expertise. Padmé is astonished to see the ferocious sandstorm that is her husband’s vengeance simply… stop. He ducks his head slightly as he looks over at Obi-wan before coming back to Padmé’s side and gently laying his hands on her arms.

“I’m sorry love, I was just lost in my head. I haven’t even checked if you are alright, let’s get you to medical.”

And that’s apparently that. Disaster averted and back to business as usual. Like it’s normal for Obi-wan to calm the beast that’s Anakin’s anger with only the accented sound of his name. She blinks incredulously as Anakin steer her away and all she can think is… _how?_

She starts paying a little more attention to them after that, instead of letting herself get swept up in Anakin’s wake. She watches The Team at work, the natural ebb and flow of their conversations. 

She quickly realises that it wasn’t just a fluke, Obi-wan tempers Anakin, can control him in a way she can’t help but be a little jealous of.

It’s always an awe to see, the way her terrifying force of a husband will so easily give in to the other Jedi, listens to him in a way he so rarely does to others. The monster that could and would raze a city in its fury, showing his belly for the modest and soft-spoken negotiator. That’s not to say he always listen, Anakin has too much of a bull-headed and dominant personality for that, but Padmé believes Obi-wan Kenobi is the only man in the universe who can make him seem almost… _submissive._

She finds it an amusing to watch, because while both her and Anakin have rather dominant personalities, even as a child Anakin always did have something otherworldly about him. A presence to him that you couldn’t help but defer to, for your own safety if nothing else. Being in a relationship with him sometimes feels like she is a one-manned ship who decided to chain to a comet as it hurtles its way through a supernova. Beautiful, exhilarating and deadly. She barely can keep her ship from falling apart, let alone try to control the damn thing. 

Having sex with that, as good (amazing, _life-changing_ ) as it is, is a war in itself. 

He’s a little too much, a little too frantic, the wildness of his love feeling like it’s burning her flesh as he moves. She tries to direct his movements, moans achingly in approval and trails fingers along his trembling muscles in attempted commands, but he seems to slip through her fingers like smoke and liquid fire. She knows he would listen to her if she told him to stop, to _slow down Anakin for god sake I’m only human_ , but in all honesty, she doesn’t want to snuff out her nebulous. Simply tame it. An almost impossible task.

One day after a particularly dreadful week for the war, in which Anakin is perhaps a tad too rough and herself a little too frustrated with her ability to project to Anakin what she wants, she thinks jealously of Obi-wan and the way he could calmed her fiery nexu with a simple touch. Perhaps it’s the desire for control, perhaps it was simply an accident, but the next time she moans his name there is the slight curl of a coruscant accent on her tongue.

“Ana- _kin._ ”

To her amazement, it _works_. Something seems to hum brilliantly through him at the sound and just like that, the flame is flesh once more, bending willingly under the gentle guidance of her touch. He even lets her fist the back of his head as she guides his head, not simply playfully obliging her as he tends to do but genuinely letting her take control for once. It’s… empowering, as short lived as the moment is.

Yet the crux of it is that she doesn’t truly understand _why_ that worked, what it was about that coruscant curl that make her husband bend so wilfully. If only she could understand it, understand how Obi-wan it does, then perhaps taming Anakin would not be as impossible as she once thought.

So the next time she is sent on a mission that has her running into Obi-wan and Anakin, she studies the pair of them as they interact.  
She watches, and she learns. 

She notices the way that if Anakin gets too worked up in the meetings, Obi-wan simply has to shift his weight so his figure is in Anakin’s peripheral, and just like that his abrasive complaint is shoved down. Well until it can come back out in a rant to her later. 

She watches recordings where in the middle of the battlefield, the deadly combination of adrenaline and grief driving Anakin to follow his latest hair-brained instinct, Obi-wan can halt his unstoppable force with nothing more than a gentle hand on his shoulder. Re-direct him back to the plan, to be a leader not a one-man army, with nothing but the light caress of his fingers. 

She watches, learns, and then begins to pick on some tricks of her own.

Like that if Anakin is having an angry tirade, the sound of a spoon tapped twice of the side of a teacup will cause him to pause long enough for her to take back control of the argument and out her own opinion in. 

She learns that if she curls her fingers around her chin and furrows her brow a certain way while reading data pads, Anakin will try settle down and not disturb her until she looks up at him. Though she tries not to use that one too often, as if she forgets he is there and leaves him too long, he gets bored and annoyed from the lack of attention. The aftermath of which can be… destructive. 

She learns that sometimes Anakin’s ideas are too big for brain to understand how to convey all the information, but if you give him something mechanical to tinker with it helps him organise his thoughts enough to be able to properly explain. 

She begins to see the looks Obi-wan shares with Captain Rex behind their back, the rolled eyes whenever Anakin hurriedly assigns himself to guard her even in safe territory. Obi-wan, who always looks curiously blank and a little hurt whenever Anakin responds to his subtle probing and hints that he knows what is going on with blatant lies. She learns that Obi-wan knows of their relationship, if perhaps not the marriage, and knows it hurts him that Anakin has not trusted him enough to confess. She learns this, but for some reason she can’t make herself teach it to Anakin in turn. 

In the dark corners of her mind she knows not even a force user could find, on those moonless nights when Anakin is far, far away, she can’t help but worry. Worries about what will happen to them once the war is over and they are left to find out who they are without it. She worries about how a relationship works between people who have become strangers even to themselves, what their relationship will become once the veneer of war no longer hides the more troublesome parts of its nature. She doesn’t know what it will be like, once Anakin is inevitably kicked from his home and the life that has given him purpose. On those dark nights she can’t help but wonder is she is being cruel knowing that this path will leave him nothing but herself, their shotgun marriage and a relationship sustained on stolen moments and secrets. She always makes sure she is asleep before she can wonder if he will even lose that too.

So, when the dawn breaks once more and the thoughts are tucked away, she goes back to watching Obi-wan Kenobi and she learns some more. 

She watches and re-watches recordings of Obi-wan fighting Ventress until she can flirt with danger curling her lip and derision dripping from her tongue. She learns this because she has begun to _notice_ , and she has noticed the way Anakin becomes wary of the recipient of the flirting but will not respond angry jealousy he used to. That with that tone he will understand that she flirts only for the advantage it gives her. 

She notices how when Anakin does something heroic or dangerous, he looks over in her direction, prancing in front of her and showing of his pretty tail feathers. But if he does something he thinks is particularly clever or shows restraint, he will always look over to Obi-wan, beaming when the expectant praise is delivered. It’s easy, though, to pass that off simply as remnants from Anakin’s time as a padawan, not something that needs to entice the jealously of a wife.

She almost feels a little embarrassed for Anakin when, after watching Obi-wan during a meeting with the Jedi council, she realises the quickest way to get Anakin worked up enough to practically _beg_ for sex, is to sit with her thighs sprawled, the ankle of one leg resting loosely on the knee of another. It makes her feel rather… undignified, but it’s always worth it for the way that seems to be that bit more attentive to her in the events that follow. She tries not to think too much about how eager he is to eat her out like that, head bowed as he kneels between her legs. She doesn’t like the think about the origins of that hunger. 

Padmé learns a lot of things that she knows help keep their relationship strong, but sometimes she wonders if it is worth the other observations, the ones she is happier not knowing. She loves learning that whenever she is in the room, she becomes the centre of Anakin’s universe. Knows it by the way his eyes will find her no matter where she stands, that her mere presence will steal all his focus and attention. She regrets that she has to also learn that having his focus on her it just means that he doesn’t pay attention his subconscious actions, unable to stop the way his body will subconsciously lean into Obi-wan as he passes, making their shoulder’s brush. That while he will always try keep Padmé in his eyesight, he will only ever let Obi-wan guard his back. 

Anakin loves with more depth and passion in single second than most people love in a lifetime. But it was hard sometimes, to know that even though Anakin loves her with every atom of his being, he would still always love Obi-wan more. That wasn’t to say he didn’t love her. He did, he truly did, and she even thinks part of her admits that the love Anakin feels for her will always be greater than the love she feels for him. Maybe that was simply the nature of force users, why the order preached the need for emotional restraint, in an effort to try curb the ferocious capacity for emotion that existed within them. 

She’s not a force user, and it hurts to know she will never truly know her husband as a result. Will never connect with that quintessential part of his soul, will never understand his very way of life and his understanding of the universe. Not like _Obi-wan Kenobi_. 

She’s not a jealous person, not prone to being hypocritical, but sometimes she can’t help but hate Obi-wan. Something she’s embarrassed to know he as likely picked up on, judging by the wary looks he sometimes gives her. It’s not his fault though, and part of her always knew that when she married Anakin, she would be second place in his heart. Though she doubts the man realises it himself. For how could a wife compare to a soulmate, to the second half of a circle, a father-friend-brother- ~~lover~~ , _a team_. 

She thinks she could have lived with that, lived with being second place to the legend that was Obi-wan Kenobi, if it was simply a platonic love. She thinks back to her days as teen and how she knew the feelings for her boyfriend at the time would never compare to the love she felt for the handmaidens who protected her life, whom she had known for years not simply months. She understands that romantic love does not automatically mean the strongest love. She and Anakin knew each other through stolen moments, while he and Obi-wan had lived, breathed, died for each other since Anakin was a child. So, she thinks she could have lived being second place to that, so long as she knew she possessed that romantic part of Anakin’s heart no one else got to have. That Obi-wan and the universe could have every other part, but she alone would know she possessed the romance and the lust. 

But now she has learnt of binary suns forever brushing shoulders as they pass, of a mouth panting between sprawled legs and the sound of teacups chiming. She remembers and she knows she cannot solely claim even that part of his heart, because it was not simply a platonic love was it? Anakin Skywalker loved her, but he loved Obi-wan Kenobi too. 

She watches Obi-wan for Anakin, but it’s hard not to learn some things about the man in turn. She learns Anakin is not exaggerating Obi-wan’s rather blatant disregard for his own health, and that if it wasn’t for Anakin and Commander Cody he would be unlikely to eat or sleep at all. She sees the shadows on Obi-wan’s face and the callousness that sometimes shadows his actions that spoke of centuries of tough decision. She thinks that perhaps Obi-wan was forged in fire and blood, not simply born the perfect Jedi as Anakin seemed to believe. 

She learns Obi-wan doesn’t actually like tarine tea all that much, but it’s the only type Anakin can stomach. So, it has become his drink of choice whenever Anakin is around on the rare chance he may wish to join him. She notices that despite this, he will sometimes make it subconsciously even when Anakin if not there, as if wishing he was by his side instead. Whether out of worry or simply missing him, she doesn’t know. 

She becomes familiar with the way Obi-wan flirts with enemies, with past lovers and new contacts. With friends, strangers, politicians and Jedi. He flirts with dazzling smiles for royalty, and sweets for the children on the street. She learns that the negotiator flirts with every person he encounters, everyone except Anakin that is. 

She learns that Obi-wan is hypocritical, that he doesn’t practice the code he preaches. He lectures Anakin that his weapon is his life, yet will throw his own away on a whim. He says that Jedi don’t have attachments, yet she reads the reports where he throws away a battalion of men to keep Anakin from harm.

It is in watching Obi-wan that she learns one last awful truth: that Obi-wan loves him back. 

Perhaps she should feel worried about how much time the two spend, but she knows Anakin is too loyal to her and too ignorant of his emotions. She doesn’t worry, not about infidelity at least. Obi-wan too loyal to the Jedi and not as ignorant to their relationship as he pretends. The war is too important to jeopardise it by voicing things best left unsaid. It’s the right thing to do, her silence saving them both complications that could very well ruin their friendship. Yet she can’t help but feel… cruel in her silence. Anakin has no intentions to be with anyone other than her, has never even thought of a future without her. Is it so wrong of her? To want to be happy. To want Anakin to be happy with _her_. To live out the dream they always spoke of, _together_. 

She knows Anakin will always love her, that she will always love him despite his flaws and unruly nature. Yet sometimes in the middle of the night, when she feels so tired and wrung out that she can barely lift her head to watch Anakin’s naked form as he paces in front of the window that overlooks the city, she wishes. Wishes she could be what he needs. That she couldn’t just wrangle her nexu but tame it. Reduce him to the writhing mess he always makes her. To see him so undone; aching, whining, _needy_. Make him let go of his running thoughts and the chaos of his being. To let him give in to pure instinct, trusting someone else to take care of him for once. She wants him to know that peace can be found outside of the battlefield. 

But he won’t let her be that for him, unable to let himself be that vulnerable. Not to _her_ at least. So instead she sits in bed alone, eyes flicking back and forth as they follow Anakin’s restless march. 

She’s reminded, suddenly, of visiting the zoo as a young child of Naboo, the guide stopping before the cage of a blue narglatch, the large feline staring into her very soul from behind the bars. Her tutor had sounded so happy as she had cheerfully read from the guidebook. “Now did you know that a narglatch mother always give birth to twins, whom she abandons after birth, leaving the cubs to hunt together and protect each other until maturity. These cute cubs were once a desired pet by many elite families, however narglatchs becomes extremely dangerous upon maturity, causing the owning of narglatches to be made illegal in most republic states. This lucky guy was rescued after he escaped onto the streets of Coruscant.”

She remembers thinking that the feline didn’t look lucky at all, pacing furiously along a well-worn ditch at the front of the cage. He had the same look in his eyes that she knew Anakin would have now, the restlessness of a wild animal who didn’t understand his own instincts. Feeling trapped, but not knowing enough about freedom to know the difference. 

“Come to bed Anakin,” she murmurs softly, knowing his keen hearing will pick up the smallest whisper of her words. 

He pauses for a moment to look at her over his shoulder, before shaking his head and resuming his pacing. God she tries, she loves Anakin with all the love she is capable of and knows she would happily spend every moment of the rest of her life chained to this comet in the middle of a supernova…

“Not yet Padmé.”

…but sometimes she simply isn’t enough.

“Ana- _kin.”_

This time he listens. _Of course_ he listens, padding with all the silent grace of a wildcat as he makes his way to the bed, lifting the covers to slide in beside her. She lets him curl himself along her back, glad that with his face pressed into her neck he won’t be able to see the tears silently falling off her cheeks and onto the pillow below.

**Author's Note:**

> [Come say hi to me on Tumblr!!](https://milkywaybandit.tumblr.com/)


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